Does it Matter Who Killed Lucy Pollard? Narrative, Historiography, and the Cause Celebre

Suzanne Lebsock. A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 442 pp. Photographs, illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $26.95.

On June 14, 1895, in Lunenburg County, Virginia, someone hacked Lucy Pollard to death with an ax right outside her back door, stole eight hundred dollars in cash that her husband Edward kept stashed in the couple's liquor cabinet, and ran off. In small places, almost anything unusual attracts attention, and it understates the matter significantly to say that it was unusual for fifty-six year-old wives of white farmers to be victimized by ax murderers in Lunenburg, a southside tobacco county so rural that it lacked even a single town and so isolated that the railroad nearly bypassed it altogether. As word spread about the demise of Lucy Pollard, dozens of people flocked to the Pollard farm to gawk and search for evidence, while hundreds of eager men grabbed their shotguns and canvassed the countryside for suspects. Within days, one man and three women were in custody. All were black and all were taken under cover of darkness by Lunenburg officials to jail in Petersburg, more than sixty miles from the scene of the crime, for fear that they might fall prey to mob violence before their cases ever came to trial.

It is of little surprise that suspicion attached in this case to African Americans, whose supposed natural criminality whites in the nineteenth century took for granted. Neither is it especially shocking that the accused had to be spirited away lest they be subjected to lynching, an atrocity whose incidence reached new heights and astonishingly barbaric proportions in the 1890s amidst the unstable and rapidly changing economic and political environment of the New South. It is Suzanne Lebsock's contention in A Murder in Virginia, however, that a great deal did take this case out of the realm of the ordinary and expected once we look beyond how the initial events transpired, and she has taken it upon herself to recover an episode fleetingly famous in its time but, by her reckoning, curiously neglected in our histories for nearly a century. ¹

The story Lebsock offers is undeniably an unconventional one, with enough twists and turns to suit fans of the most labyrinthine crime novels, and she tells it skillfully and inventively. But the scholarly contribution of A Murder in Virginia is limited, substantiating the insights of much of New South historiography of the last half-century more than contributing to or even elaborating much upon them. Perhaps the fact that historians have not accorded the significance to Lucy Pollard's murder and its aftermath that Lebsock does says something about the ultimate magnitude of the story. Sometimes causes celebrated in their day make for gripping reading but not for momentous history.

Solomon Marable, like many other black men in the late-nineteenth-century South, struggled to find remunerative work. Particularly during the depression that followed the Panic of 1893, steady employment was hard to come by, and the best Marable could do in the spring of 1895 was labor intermittently hauling timber at a sawmill in Lunenburg County, where he lived with his wife and two young sons a few miles south of Edward Pollard's farm. In the wake of the murder and robbery in Lunenburg, word spread fast when a man in Marable's economic circumstances used a twenty-dollar bill to pay for his breakfast in a neighboring county, and it was just a matter of time before the posse looking for Lucy Pollard's killer finally caught up with him.

Upon being captured, Marable conceded that he had been at the Pollard farm on the day of the murder, but insisted that he had had nothing to do with the death of Lucy Pollard. Instead, Marable said that three...